The Shepherd and the Star - Part V
Throughout the facility, Daniels voice pounded out of the communications. The scientists, engineers and the soldiers guarding them seemed to stop in place as the announcement fell down on them. * ‘This is Daniels. The Agency has taken command of Solace now. I have been informed that the General was not acting with the Agency when she arrived here, and was instead acting on her own terms. She has gone rogue, and has been confined to the top levels of our colony. She used her high level clearance to infiltrate our numbers and learn what we learned...about the ship.’ The General sat at the table within the meeting room above, tapping her fingers against the dusty woodwork as she leant her head on her shoulder and hummed something beneath her breath. She could hear the announcement clearer than anyone, but did not seem taken by it at all. * ‘We were played from the moment she arrived here. The UA is sending the appropriate forces to take her off our hands, so we can get back to work. All missions that she had set are to be immediately called off.’ Daniels continued. * ‘Commander...’ she sighed ‘why was this so profoundly predictable?’ The General tore a small radio device from her belt and attached it to her hand, then curved the small amp so that it hovered to the left of her mouth before she switched it on. * ‘Alright, there’s the signal. You were right about the Commander. She’s too...Well she’s internalised too much, but she’ll see. I’m on my way down now. Just go with what we talked about. Everything will play out as expected, I promise you.’ She said quietly and with poise, before she stood and kicked the chair back, then climbed onto the table itself and looked up. --- The Commander stood beside Daniels as he continued the announcement, massaging her bottom lip with her fingers timidly with her other arm folded across her stomach. There was suddenly a patchy chorus of ‘what the hell’s from the scientists at their posts as the monitors before them started to become extremely fuzzy, and the colonel’s announcement became replaced by a loud mechanical screech. Alarms suddenly sang down the silver hallways of Solace, as each space became shrouded in darkness. Emergency power overwhelmed the security room. * ‘Power failure?’ Daniels assumed and bent down beside one of the scientists who desperately started to hit the keys of his console. * ‘N-No, I don’t know what it is...’ the scientist responded anxiously ‘everything’s just...everything’s just-...’ * ‘-vanished.’ Daniels confirmed as he checked the console himself, and then launched an ominous stare at the Commander, who rebound it over her own and back up the stairs towards the meeting room. She unlatched her sidearm again and marched. Daniels budged the scientist out of the way, and tried himself to hack back into the mainframe. That was when it all went black, and a small coded message in white typed itself in on the top left of the screens. ‘YOU SHOULD HAVE TRUSTED US.’ He read and then stepped back and glanced across all of the screens which bore the same message ‘oh no.’ The Commander slid open the meeting room door, slipped her pistol through the gap and scanned. It was empty, except for the gap in the ceiling where the security recording fell from. The device itself lay in fragments across the floor, and she approached the gap to discover a series of hidden, ancient mining vents. * ‘Crap!’ She said as she turned back and rushed back down to the security room to meet Daniels as well as the warning on the consoles. * ‘It’s everywhere, across every mainframe on every level. She’s hacked everything. She can’t be working alone-...’ Daniels started. * ‘Colonel!’ One of the scientists yelled as he pressed his radio device further into his ear ‘We’re receiving word of gunfire from the lower levels, near the hangar bay.’ * ‘She’s insane. This will all spiral out of control!’ Daniels shouted back. * ‘This has already spiralled out of control. We can’t let her escape.’ The Commander told him. * ‘Security’s already been ordered to arrest her on sight but, they’re no match for an agent, Commander.’ --- Half-a-mile beneath the security room, dark hallways in the midst of hundreds of laboratories and offices echoed with bullets and the screams of those who had been imbedded with them. A group of scientists barricaded themselves within one of the smaller labs, using the light of a deep blue liquid within a test tube as their source of vision. One of them tapped the communications but only met failure, as the others shifted tables and chairs in front of the magnetic door. * ‘What the hell is going on? Why are the guards shooting civilians?!’ One whispered to another beneath the roar of gunfire in the hallway just outside. They were all silenced by a mysterious tapping from the ceiling. The vent shattered and the General fell and landed on her knee. * ‘Oh, thank god...’ became the last comprehensible words uttered in the chamber. After she had shot them all, she kicked the barricades out of the way and shifted open the magnetic door. She stepped out into the hallway, breathless from all of the crawling around in the frame of the facility, and became immediately ignorant to the other corpses littering the floor. A small group of guards came around the corner and raised their weapons as they saw her, then lowered them as the light of the torches highlighted her face. * ‘Hold fire. We’ve been waiting for you, General.’ The squad leader nodded to her ‘We’ve cleared the way to the hangar but um, it should probably be noted that it’s been out of use since the miners were here, and now the shields are at their lowest...There’s a chance that the ice can’t handle it. There’s a change we’ll destroy Solace.’ * ‘Chances with prizes and chances that we all must take, captain, don’t show remorse for these idiots. It’s their ignorance that brought this, not yours and certainly not mine. Is the device ready?’ she said after she had finally caught her breath. Her voice seemed different when she gave orders, as if everything she had said to the Commander had been an act. * ‘It is, we had the engineers fix it up before we put them down. I should’ve probably asked this before but what’s with all of the terraforma crates we’ve been storing beside the relay turrets?’ he had to ask. * ‘Add two and two together, captain.’ She sighed. * ‘Yes, General, and team B is already in the elevator. Those poor bastards actually believe they’re coming with us.’ He validated, and reloaded his rifle. * ‘They’ll be heroes in the new world, I’m sure.’ She smiled. --- Back in the security room, the consoles had all been drained of power. Only one of them, an older model from Solace’s mining days, fought the odds. One of the lead scientists hacked its basic mainframe with the Commander and Daniels by his sides. A virtual replica of the facilities layout sprinkled across the dusty screen as he brought up the appropriate files. * ‘Here’s an old map of Solace, Commander. The facility looks different but this map was made two hundred years ago so forgive all of the stuff that has eroded away since then. I’ve added more modern files though. The red dots are the guards and the blue dots are everyone else.’ He explained quickly. * ‘...And how do we know who’s alive and who’s dead?’ Daniels tapped his shoulder. * ‘Just focus on the ones that are moving, Colonel.’ The Commander said, she’d been in similar situations before ‘we can assume that the General is one of these then?’ She nodded to a small blur, a group of the red dots with a blue in the middle, which were collectively shuffling further and further into the bowels of the map. ‘...Wait, if the guards are acting as a first defence. What should we make of these?’ Daniels knocked on the screen and to an even bigger blur of red in a small room which appeared to be rising up through the centre of the map. * ‘That’s...That’s the elevator.’ The scientist stammered and glared over to the two elevator doors across the shuffle of personnel, and the approaching hum of the elevator itself rising below. The Colonel pulled out his sidearm as the Commander double-checked her ammunition. * ‘She’s hypnotised them!’ Daniels loaded his rifle. * ‘It’s a bit more real than that, Colonel.’ She ensured him ‘Alright, everyone move up into the meeting room and begin crawling through the vent shafts. Don’t exit them, just stay hidden. I’m gonna fix this!’ Her order was met with gasps and screams, but they all obeyed and a chaotic scuffle up the small flight of steps and into the meeting room ensued. It quickened as the humming of the elevator got louder. The Colonel through one of the larger consoles onto its side and kneeled behind it with his pistol resting on its surface, before he then looked up to the Commander who calmly rested her backside against the mining console. * ‘Commander! Are you insane? There’s about 12 of them!’ he yelled as the last scientist was about to leave, but she clutched his arm and pulled him before her. * ‘Open the elevator doors.’ She ordered. * ‘...But it’s not here yet!’ he stuttered. * ‘I know.’ Confused, he acted and pushed a series of switches before he rushed to join his colleagues. The iron doors shifted apart, revealing the lift shaft as the elevator advanced. Without really thinking, she ripped a grenade from her belt, tore off the pin and competently launched it, against the Colonel’s frantic warnings that Solace was quite unstable as it was. The grenade subtle bounced off the wall after it soared through the doors and then fell, until it slammed into the roof of the elevator and rested for the short remainder of its life. Inside of the elevator, the group of mutineers at once looked up in a very mutual inquisitiveness, before their faces were blown off. The cables raising the elevator splintered then shattered before it dropped. The Commander blinked once as she spotted the top of the explosion creep up through the shaft, as the body of it was pulled down with their corpses. The facility shook violently. --- The General marched into the hangar with her guards as Solace quaked, to which she subsequently almost lost her balance and stared up. * ‘Commander...’ she groaned quietly, before she shook it off ‘let’s get out of here.’ As they were about to continue, the elevator doors yards behind them suddenly opened and released a moderately upset inferno. It rushed through the hallway and was stopped as the magnetic doors sealed it in. --- As the security room shook even more, the Commander tucked her pistol away and took a few steps back, and then rubbed her boots against the floor like a bull about to charge at something very, very red. * ‘Solace is too unstable now. You may have doomed us all, Commander!’ Daniels cried. * ‘You’ll be fine, just don’t piss Europa off anymore than you need to,’ she comforted him somehow ‘as for me...Tell the Agency when they arrive that I failed to detain the General, but that I’ve gone to make things right. I’m bringing her back.’ * ‘How do you know where she’ll go?’ he asked, not realising that his pistol was still pointed at the elevator shaft. * ‘She’ll go to the ship. That’s what all this is about. She wants change. She considers herself a revolutionary, but the world will consider her an interstellar terrorist-...’ she started. * ‘-But she has around thirty armed allies with her. How can you possibly hope to withstand them? You’re on your own.’ He argued. The room shook for a final time before she replied. * ‘Yeah, nothing changes...’ was her last words to him. She dashed and leapt, and before three seconds were up – she was gone the same way as the men she had just killed, down the shaft. * ‘...Agents.’ Daniels finally exhaled. --- The explosion made the hangar tremble and quiver as Solace finally started to show her age. The General struggled across the metal plain of nuts and bolts leftovers from the facilities mining era and rested against the cargo ramp of a small and ancient battle cruiser. Its name plate was worn by time, but she appeared relatively flight worthy, and had been fitted with modern interstellar technology. She could fly to Earth and back at the same speed of any modern ships, and carried an illegal set of crates of terraforma aboard. After a few minutes, the huge chamber seemed to stabilise. * ‘General, we should go now before it’s too late!’ the squad leader warned as the last of his group climbed aboard the vessel. She took the opportunity to scan for the hangar doors, which were already wide-open but the exit had been completely frozen over. She nodded and was about to stand when she heard somebody knocking. The sound resonated through the thick metal of the magnetic doors to the charred elevator shift. She was very aware of the foreboding silence between the knocks. Curious, she nodded to the squad leader who hit one of the switches on his remote device. The magnetic doors unsealed, revealing the Commander to be stood amidst a few enflamed corpses. * ‘...Commander, how dramatic of you to appear to me now.’ The General said quietly, but the room carried her voice to the Commander’s ears ‘I trust you’re not here to discuss a change of heart?’ * ‘You’re a liability, General. This isn’t how it should be. Can’t you see how this is wrong? This plan is absurd. The world hasn’t succumbed to terrorism since the beginning of Rapture. It’s chaos.’ The Commander said, composed but desperate to make her case ‘Please, end this now.’ * ‘I didn’t want it to be like this. I never wanted it to be like this. It just happened. A lot of things just happened, and now this has happened. People have died, and will continue to die until the government loses its place. Like I have.’ She said ‘It’s not about us, Commander. I won’t continue to be a sword of the Agency’s right hand, but you’ll know where I’ll be, and I know how your mind works. There’s a small battle pod in the hangar beside this one, although its weapons have been scavenged. This base was so much more than a mining facility once. Your neural implants command you to chase me, so I guess I’ll see you aboard the alien ship. I guess that’s where all of this will be decided, and so until then...’ She waved and stepped back into the vessel as the cargo ramp sealed her in and the engines activated. The Commander covered her eyes as the ship hovered above the fractured ground and swerved to face to wall of ice, and then two lasers fired a heat beam at the top – collapsing it into the hangar and causing Solace to shudder once more. The burst of wind from the engines propelled the Commander back into the elevator shaft, and extinguished the fire around her as the ship swayed from left to right – and then fired itself out and across the frozen surface of Europa. The Commander’s determination overwhelmed her desire to rest, and she soared out of the shaft and rushed back into the hangar, only to watch the ship climb through the night atmosphere. She quickly slid on her helmet and tapped the magnetic lock online in her boots as the shields died and the oxygen was ripped out of the chamber. in Part VI